A Most Wanted list you say? Cripes, whatever next: a Tips and Cheats pamphlet to go with Eurogamer’s promotional Pacman Beach Ball cover mount? Still, it’s the summer, there are precious few games around and, with an awful lot of new titles coming up towards the end of the year you might quite reasonably want to know which ones to keep an eye on.

So here are the rules: each game on this list will, at time of writing, be released this side of Christmas day as a full release boxed title. Sadly these restrictions mean we can’t mention forthcoming Live Arcade treasures such as John Hare’s beautiful game Sensible World of Soccer or Jeff Minter’s psychedelic but under – no – circumstances – point – out – it – looks – a – bit – like – Tempest, Space Giraffe. Nor are we able to salivate (at least on this page) over Namco’s Beautiful Katamari, Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey or Treasure’s new and as yet unnamed action game, all titles that demonstrate the Xbox 360 has more to offer than just guns, football, guns, driving and guns.

Anyhow, what follows is a quick rundown of the videogames coming to 360 that are promising the most and which are, crucially, backed by developers who seem to be mostly staying abreast of those promises. These are the games which, if all goes to plan, will be uplifting and glorious experiences rather than those all too frequently visited digital playgrounds of missed opportunity and buyer’s regret.

You be dazzled and amazed at the choice of titles in the list over at Eurogamer here.

The best of the comedians, Daniel Kitson, has been publishing recordings of his shows and cute short stories on his Podcast stream with increasing regularity of late.

The stuff on there is funny and quirky and interesting and good and you should get acquainted right away if you don’t know of him because you really should know of him. I wish my brain worked a little more like his.

Um, I think this link should open the podcast stream providing you have like iTunes on your machine and stuff. If that doesn’t work just search for his name on the iTunes store and it’ll pop up soon enough.

Here’s a clip from his show ‘Stories for the Wobbly Hearted’ for good measure.

This could so easily have been ‘look at what they physically impaired guy can do nearly as well as a normal dancer’-thing but no, Bill Shannon, who has a degenerative hip condition, moves in a unique and other way which is mesmerising and wonderful.

There’s not even a subtext of pity for the watcher as Shannon’s freedom and joyous movements conspire with Joey Garfield’s perfectly premeditated direction to create something uplifting.

Also: doesn’t RJD2 look a lot like Dave Gorman?

Also also: neat peek behind the curtain:

So, the Queen and the BBC and tantrums and oh, the drama! and it’s all in the editing, right?

The story last week, for those who somehow missed it, is that the BBC is in trouble for claiming that a fly-on-the-wall documentary to be screened later in the year shows the Queen storming out of a photoshoot.

A trailer was shown at the unveiling of the BBC’s autumn schedules in which photographer Annie Leibovitz apparently asked the Queen to remove her crown because it was too “dressy”.

The Queen, in response, was shown saying: “Less dressy? What do you think this is?”

In the next shot, the Queen apparently stormed out of the room, with a footman following, as she complained: “I’m not changing anything. I’ve done enough dressing like this, thank you very much.”

So anyway, it turns out that the footage had been edited in the wrong order and the shot of the Queen leaving was in fact one of the Queen entering thus twisting the narrative into a new shape for dramatic effect and yadda yadda you all know the story and it’s SO last week.

The BBC and the production company responsible duly apologised, the pointless will/he won’t he regrading various senior BBC people’s resignations did two rounds in the press at the end of last week and the weekend papers trotted out opinion pieces on how TV LIES TO US and won’t they think of the children etc.

It’s all a little yawnsome because, we mostly know that at one level or another, much of what we see in television is a lie/ set-up. Sometimes it’s in horrible and exploitative ways but mostly it’s just because of the way in which producers have to tell a story using cameras.

It was all fine and predictable until former BBC chairman Michael Grade, who now runs ITV, made some comments via the Today Programme and made me a bit furious. Here’s what he said:

“We are in an age today where there has been a huge influx of young talent into the industry as it expands. They have not been trained properly, they don’t understand that you do not lie to audiences at any time, in any show – whether it’s news or whether it’s a quiz show … It’s desperately important that we restore trust and that the programme-makers get to understand – whether through hard lessons or through training or a combination of both – that you do not lie to audiences under any circumstances.”

Right, so it’s all the fault of young editors who have no experience of telling the truth then.

With expert timing The Guardian step in today with a long feature on why everything on TV’s actually always been a lie, with a slew of brilliant OFCom case studies from across television’s past where programme makers have been found to be economical with the truth.

It’s all good reading but Cutting Edge in particular have sure had some corkers:

In 1998 Cutting Edge had to pull a show about girls who were unusually close to their fathers after the subject Victoria Greetham’s real father came forward to point out that the man on the show was, in fact, her fiance. Another Cutting Edge film, Too Much Too Young – Chickens (C4), used members of the production team to “reconstruct” scenes of rent boys being picked up in Glasgow. A similar documentary, Rogue Males, faked key black-market dealing scenes. The leader of the pack in terms of fines, however, is the £2m imposed by the ITC on Carlton Communications’ 1996 showpiece investigation The Connection, a faked documentary about Colombian drug cartels.

A whole entire faked documentary? Incredible.

Anyway, perhaps the reason all the young editors and producers are to blame is because all of the older ones are either bankrupt or in prison following heavy ITC and OFCom fines, Mr Grade.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction but, generally speaking, fiction’s a lot more interesting, better-structured and suited to neat hour-long TV episodes. So long as we’re led to believe it’s the Truth, of course.

The sticker on G1 Jockey’s box explains: ‘The Wii remote is your whip… the Nunchuck your reigns’ and with that the horseracing videogame joke has its best punch line yet.

For most gamers Japan’s ongoing servicing of this most niche of sporting genres is something to giggled at and then politely ignored.

After all, who’d want to role-play being a little man riding about on a horse? Or, at least, who’d want to role-play being a little man riding about on a horse without a princess to rescue or a Master Sword to wield.

Now, with the Wii’s control system once again removing the layers of abstraction, the image of grown men bouncing up and down bow-legged in the front room, the Wii remote in one hand whipping away at their bums, Nunchuck clutched tightly in the other, indifference is turned to wonder and ridicule.

But if you’re expecting Koei’s latest horse racing game, a souped-up conversion of the PS2′s G1 Jockey 4, to be all whips and giggles then you’re in for a rude awakening. This is about as far from Wii Play’s cow racing as you can get. Best described as the Gran Turismo of the jockey genre, the G1 Jockey games are punishing, vast and deep simulators, which, thanks to the Wii’s control scheme, have just received their equivalent of a force feedback steering wheel.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

You’ve just over two weeks left to send in an entry to the 2007 International Sticker Awards.

With its headquarters in Dresden, Germany, this competition invites participants to e-mail or post in either a photograph of a sticker they’ve created in location, or simply the original sticker art file.

There are three top prizes which, brilliantly, are basically piles and piles of your winning design printed onto high-quality vinyl stickers.

If you’ve no idea what this is all about take a look at 2006′s three winners below and you’ll soon get the idea.

It’s a bit like Banksy except with more glue and less illegality (possibly).

First Place:

Second Place:

Third Place:

Right. I’m sorry about this. I want to think and write and post but I’m drowning in actual work which, while definitely A Good Thing, is also choking out other things I’d like to be doing.

Still, most of what I’m up to is fun and exciting but not all of it I can talk about, or reprint here. In fact, one super-secret thing at the end of the month has a specific clause in its NDA that I don’t talk about it to any of the people I usually write for (listed). That’s a new one.

Anyway, keeping a clear head through it all hasn’t been helped by two weeks spent back in the world of Xenogears, that super-complex sci-fi RPG epic for the first PlayStation. Replaying it while also working through Sakaguchi’s new 360 RPG, Blue Dragon, has been enlightening. Xenogears, love it or hate it, is an extraordinary videogame with a story that vastly outstretches many of today’s cutting edge releases in the genre in both scope and ambition. Sure, it doesn’t always succeed but sheesh, you’ve got to admire its balls and vision.

Some of my time at non-freelance work has been spent managing a pitch (written by a friend) for a sci-fi animation series for the BBC and so, what with this and Xenogears, apocalyptic imagery is never far from the door.

Perhaps because of this, in my spare (ha!) time I’m also working through some “End Times” theology, pulling apart John Darby’s frankly bonkers theory of Dispensationalism (y’know, the one about the Rapture, a theology less than 200 years old and yet accepted by vast swathes of the modern Church/ culture as being gospel truth mainly thanks to someone at the Oxford University Press plonking it in the Schofield reference Bible in 1909 thus giving it unwarranted intellectual credence), and trying to find something to slot meaningfully in its place. (Fun fact: did you know that not once throughout the Bible is ‘Heaven’ used as a word for a literal place other than on Planet Earth?).

Er, anyway, that’s me right now. I’m aware this might sound a bit like a ‘look at me doing all well and everything!’ post dressed up as some kind of pitiful cry for help. It’s not really that though: I’m just not writing as many original thoughts and posts here as I want to be, and this is the reason as much as the excuse.

In lieu of my ideas, here are two posts from blogs on google reader (which you should really be using) that I really enjoyed today:

Zen Bullets on living in a post-Singular world.

The parish on whether or not humanity is ‘a glorious ruin’.

And, to round off with, here’s a cute animation about the happiness factory. Never have lies dressed so cute.

Another Transformers movie promotional web delivery to show you. Head over to this URL and you can create your own Transformers robot messenger – kinda.

Anyway, this is basically how I want my operating system to look so it was fun to produce. Enjoy!

An exchange overheard in Computer Exchange Brighton this lunchtime.

Boy (late teens, sheepish and shifty) splays out three Xbox 360 titles on the shop counter: “Er, excuse me. How are these games?”

Assistant (mid-twenties, cocksure with eager opinions), ignoring the imprecision of the question, points at each title in turn: “Rubbish, Shit, Rubbish.”

Boy (quietly): “OK. But are they easy?”

Assistant (faltering): “Er”

Boy (almost whispering): “For getting achievement points, I mean”

Assistant (confident, buoyed by understanding): “Aah! Yes. Open Season’s a must then. That’s the only reason people buy it: 1000 gamerpoints for 4 hours easy work. We do a cracking trade in that one. You should pick up King Kong too if achievements are what you’re after.”

Boy (beaming): “Excellent, I’ll take that both of those then.”

Me (ashen-faced): “…”

Playing terrible videogames to completion in order to (mistakenly) try to earn the respect/ jealousy of peers and strangers: is there any victory more Pyhrric? I mean, other than landing a job as a games tester, obviously.

Megaman is a 2D action game hero defined as much by what he can’t do as by what he can.

The diminutive blue android’s inability to duck increasingly seems like stubborn servicing of an ill-advised tradition rather than a deliberate, meaningful design decision.

Likewise, when fighting a towering boss whose weak point is at a direct 45 degree angle above your position, you’ll curse his ongoing failure to perform diagonal shooting today just as players did fifteen years ago.

Hard-nosed series fans assert that this is all part of the charm. By limiting Megaman’s repertoire of moves to jump, shoot and skid, they argue, the experience retains a purity and simplicity. Angled shooting is for boys who can’t time their jumps properly while crouching is just for cowering cowards.

As if to rub cynics’ noses in the decision, Megaman ZX’s lead character comes in two different forms. In the weak human form your character can duck, allowing you to squeeze through tight tunnels and easily dodge incoming bullets flying at head height. However, with no other offensive moves, this form is pointless for anything other than blending in with the game’s civilians. Conversely, your second, super-souped up form, Model X, while offering the full gamut of offensive options, provides no crouch. As such you have to switch between each form to negotiate even the simplest of low ceilings before taking out an enemy. It’s an unsatisfactory compromise that’s more irritating than liberating.

Despite this admittedly overarching grievance with the Megaman template, this latest DS iteration, which follows on from the GBA’s competent side-scrolling action titles, is good and interesting. Its designers have chosen to borrow some of the 2D Metroid and Castlevania games’ ideas, shoehorning Megaman’s bright futuristic pixels into a sprawling 2D world of interconnected areas to explore.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.